More Thoughts In Light of Yesterday's Thoughts

[kerravonsen]

Hierarchy of importance:

1. Important enough to do badly.
"If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing badly."

2. Not important enough to do badly, but important enough to do well.
"If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing well."

3. Not important enough to do well.

Comments

[kittylefish.livejournal.com]

i concur with this hierarchy.

[izhilzha.livejournal.com]

I like this--the top one was very hard for me to learn, I've always been stuck on the second one down (which meant that most things I could not "do well" simply were never attempted).

[vjezkova.livejournal.com]

Yes, that´s the life...:-)

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

[miamadwyn.livejournal.com]

Many years ago a friend said her teenaged daughter had learned something important in therapy that friend thought I might need to think about. And that is how the desire for perfection can lead to being frozen and doing nothing.

And I stared at her like she was out of her fucking mind. Anybody who knows me knows that I am not a perfectionist. I am surrounded by chaos. I have never done anything perfectly in my life, EVER. Nor have I tried.

And yet as we talked, she made me parse out the fact that in the back of my mind I do have this perfect image of how things should be, and feel so woefully inadequate that I don't even try.

A weird form of perfectionism, huh. Self-preservation, protecting myself from failure by not attempting? Sometimes. But more often, feeling so inadequate to the task that I can't even begin it.

And when it comes to things like schoolwork and deadlines, being so overwhelmed by how the finished project should be (in my head) that I'm frozen in place until deadline screams so loudly that need to 'do it well' is no longer an option, and 'get it done' is the only criteria by which I will judge myself.

I have an ability to turn in pretty decent stuff once I get to that moment in time where desperation is bigger than the original vision in my head.

[bktheirregular]

There's also the old saying, attributed to Voltaire but possibly dates back much earlier: "the perfect is the enemy of the good".

Actually, I first ran across it as an aphorism of an engineer in the Apollo moon program, as "the better is the enemy of the good", as a warning against people getting bogged down trying to keep thinking of better ways to accomplish a goal, when at some point they had to knuckle down and get to the actual accomplishment. They had genius designers and engineers building some of the most sophisticated machines the world had ever seen, but there came a point where they had to lock down the designs and actually start building the things.

Example: attempts to design a sophisticated fuel gauge, very tricky in zero gravity, were set aside in favor of simply using a reserve fuel tank. Example: an autopilot was behind schedule because the manufacturers were so paranoid about its surviving high humidity that they were trying (and failing) to make it robust enough to survive being dunked completely underwarer...